Critical Remarks on the National Question

2. “NATIONAL CULTURE”

Asthe reader will see, the article inSevernaya Pravda, made
use of a particular example, i. e., the problem of the official language,
to illustrate the inconsistency and opportunism of the liberal bourgeoisie,
which, in the national question, extends a hand to the feudalists and the
police. Everybody will understand that, apart from the problem of an
official language, the liberal bourgeoisie behaves just as treacherously,
hypocritically and stupidly (even from the standpoint of the interests of
liberalism) in a number of other related issues.

Theconclusion to be drawn from this? It is thatallliberal-bourgeois nationalism sows the greatest corruption among the
workers and does immense harm to the cause of freedom and the proletarian
class struggle. This bourgeois (and bourgeois-feudalist) tendency is all
the more dangerous for itsbeing concealedbehind the slogan of
“national culture”. It is under the guise of national
culture—Great-Russian, Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, and so forth—that the
Black-Hundreds and the clericals, and also the bourgeoisie ofallnations, are doing their dirty and reactionary work.

Suchare the facts of the national life of today, if viewed from the
Marxist angle, i. e., from the standpoint of the class struggle, and if the
slogans are compared with the interests and policies of classes, and not
with meaningless “general principles”, declamations and phrases.

Theslogan of national culture is a bourgeois (and often also a
Black-Hundred, and clerical) fraud. Our slogan is:
the international culture of democracy and of the world working-class
movement.

Herethe
Bundist[1]Mr. Liebman rushes into the fray and annihilates me with the
following deadly tirade:

“Anyonein the least familiar with the national question
   knows that international culture is not non-national culture (culture
   without a national form); non-national culture, which must not be Russian,
   Jewish, or Polish, but only pure culture, is nonsense; international ideas
   can appeal to the working class only when they are adapted to the language
   spoken by the worker, and to the concrete national conditions under which
   he lives; the worker should not be indifferent to the condition and
   development of his national culture, becauseit is through it, and only through it, that he is able to participate in
   the ‘international culture of democracy and of the world working-class
   movement’. This is well known, but V. I. turns a deaf ear to it all....”

“Anyonein the least familiar with the national question
   knows that international culture is not non-national culture (culture
   without a national form); non-national culture, which must not be Russian,
   Jewish, or Polish, but only pure culture, is nonsense; international ideas
   can appeal to the working class only when they are adapted to the language
   spoken by the worker, and to the concrete national conditions under which
   he lives; the worker should not be indifferent to the condition and
   development of his national culture, becauseit is through it, and only through it, that he is able to participate in
   the ‘international culture of democracy and of the world working-class
   movement’. This is well known, but V. I. turns a deaf ear to it all....”

Ponderover this typically Bundist argument, designed, if you please,
to demolish the Marxist thesis that I advanced. With the air of supreme
self-confidence of one who is “familiar with the national question”, this
Bundist passes off ordinary bourgeois views as “well-known” axioms.

Itis true, my dear Bundist, that international culture is not non
national. Nobody said that it was. Nobody has proclaimed a “pure”
culture, either Polish, Jewish, or Russian, etc., and your jumble of empty
words is simply an attempt to distract the reader’s attention and to
obscure the issue with tinkling words.

Theelementsof democratic and socialist culture are present,
if only in rudimentary form, ineverynational culture, since ineverynation there are toiling and exploited masses, whose
conditions of life inevitably give rise to the ideology of democracy and
socialism. Buteverynation also possesses a bourgeois culture
(and most nations a reactionary and clerical culture as well) in the form,
not merely of “elements”, but of thedominantculture. Therefore, the general “national culture” is the culture of the
landlords, the clergy and the bourgeoisie. This fundamental and, for a
Marxist, elementary truth, was kept in the background by the Bundist, who
“drowned” it in his jumble of words, i. e.,insteadof revealing
and clarifying the class gulf to the reader, he in fact obscured it.In
fact, the Bundist acted like a bourgeois, whose every interest
requires the spreading of a belief in a non-class national culture.

Inadvancing the slogan of “the international culture of democracy and
of the world working-class movement”, we takefrom eachnational
cultureonlyits democratic and socialist elements; we take themonlyandabsolutelyin opposition to the bourgeois
culture and the bourgeois nationalism ofeachnation. No democrat,
and certainly no Marxist, denies that all languages should have equal
status, or that it is necessary to polemise with one’s “native”
bourgeoisie in one’s native language and to advocate anti-clerical or
anti-bourgeois ideas among one’s “native” peasantry andpetty bourgeoisie. That goes without saying, but the Bundist uses these
indisputable truths to obscure the point in dispute, i. e., the real issue.

Thequestion is whether it is permissible for a Marxist, directly or
indirectly, to advance the slogan of national culture, or whether he should
oppose it by advocating, in all languages, the slogan of workers’internationalismwhile “adapting” himself to all local and
national features.

Thesignificance of the “national culture” slogan is not determined
by some petty intellectual’s promise, or good intention, to “interpret”
it as “meaning the development through it of an international
culture”. It would be puerile subjectivism to look at it in that way. The
significance of the slogan of national culture is determined by the
objective alignment of all classes in a given country, and in all countries
of the world. The national culture of the bourgeoisie is afact(and, I repeat, the bourgeoisie everywhere enters into deals with the
landed proprietors and the clergy). Aggressive bourgeois nationalism, which
drugs the minds of the workers, stultifies and disunites them in order that
the bourgeoisie may lead them by the halter—such is the fundamental fact
of the times.

Thosewho seek to serve the proletariat must unite the workers of all
nations, and unswervingly fight bourgeois nationalism,domesticand foreign. The place of those who advocate the slogan of national culture
is among the nationalist petty bourgeois, not among the Marxists.

Takea concrete example. Can a Great-Russian Marxist accept the slogan
of national, Great-Russian, culture? No, he cannot. Anyone who does that
should stand in the ranks of the nationalists, not of the Marxists. Our
task is to fight the dominant, Black-Hundred and bourgeois national culture
of the Great Russians, and to develop, exclusively in the internationalist
spirit and in the closest alliance with the Workers of other countries, the
rudiments also existing in the history of our democratic and working-class
movement. Fight your own Great-Russian landlords and bourgeoisie, fight
their “culture” in the name of internationalism, and, in so fighting,
“adapt” yourself to the special features of the Purishkeviches and
Struves—that is yourtask, not preaching or tolerating the Slogan of national culture.

Thesame applies to the most oppressed and persecuted nation—the
Jews. Jewish national culture is the slogan of the rabbis and the
bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies. But there are other elements in
Jewish culture and in Jewish history as a whole. Of the ten and a half
million Jews in the world, somewhat over a half live in Galicia and Russia,
backward and semi-barbarous countries, where the Jews areforciblykept in the status of a caste. The other half lives in the civilised world,
and there the Jews do not live as a segregated caste. There the great
world-progressive features of Jewish culture stand clearly revealed: its
internationalism, its identification with the advanced movements of the
epoch (the percentage of Jews in the democratic and proletarian movements
is everywhere higher than the percentage of Jews among the population).

Whoever,directly or indirectly, puts forward the slogan of Jewish
“national culture” is (whatever his good intentions may be) an enemy of
the proletariat, a supporter of all that isoutmodedand connected
withcasteamong the Jewish people; he is an accomplice of the
rabbis and the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, those Jewish Marxists who
mingle with the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and other workers in
international Marxist organisations, and make their contribution (both in
Russian and in Yiddish) towards creating the international culture of the
working-class movement—those Jews, despite the separatism of the Bund,
uphold the best traditions of Jewry by fighting the slogan of “national
culture”.

Bourgeoisnationalism and proletarian internationalism—these are the
two irreconcilably hostile slogans that correspond to the two great class
camps throughout the capitalist world, and express the two policies (nay,
the two world outlooks) in the national question. In advocating the slogan
of national culture and building up on it an entire plan and practical
programme of what they call “cultural-national autonomy”, the Bundists
arein effectinstruments of bourgeois nationalism among the
workers.

[1]TheBund(The General Jewish Workers’ Union of Lithuania,
Poland, and Russia) came into being in 1897 at the Inaugural Congress of
Jewish Social-Democratic groups in Vilna. It consisted mainly of
semi-proletarian Jewish artisans of Western Russia. At the First Congress
of the R.S.D.L.P. in 1898 the Bund joined the latter “as an autonomous
organisation, independent only in respect of questions affecting the Jewish
proletariat specifically”. (The C.P.S.U. in Resolutions, and Decisions
of Congresses, Conferences and Plenary Meetings of the Central
Committee, Russ. ed., Part I, 1954, p. 14.)

TheBund was a vehicle of nationalist and separatist ideas in Russia’s
working-class movement. In April 1901 the Bund’s Fourth Congress resolved
to alter the organisational ties with the R.S.D.L.P. as established by the
latter’s First Congress. In its resolution, the Bund Congress declared that
it regarded the R.S.D.L.P. as a federation of national organisations, of
which the Bund was a federal member.

Followingthe rejection by the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. of the
Bund’s demand for recognition as the sole representative of the Jewish
proletariat, the Bund left the Party, but rejoined it in 1906 on the basis
of a decision of the Fourth (Unity) Congress.

Withinthe R.S.D.L.P. the Bund constantly supported the Party’s
opportunist wing (the Economists, Mensheviks, and liquidators), and waged a
struggle against the Bolsheviks and Bolshevism. To the Bolsheviks’
programmatic demand for the right of nations to self-determination the Bund
contraposed the demand for autonomy of national culture. During the years
of the Stolypin reaction and the new revolutionary upsurge, the Bund
adopted a liquidationist stand and played an active p art in the formation
of the August anti-Party bloc. During the First World War (1914–18) the
Bundists took a social-chauvinist stand. In 1917 the Bund supported the
bourgeois Provisional Government and sided with the enemies of the Great
October Socialist Revolution. During the foreign military intervention and
the Civil War, the Bundist leaders made common cause with the forces of
counter-revolution. At the same time a tendency towards co-operation with
the Soviets became apparent among the Bund rank and file. In March 1921 the
Bund dissolved itself, part of the membership joining the Russian Communist
Party (Bolsheviks) in accordance with the general rules of admission.